I mean my grandfather was a plasterer and the thing about him that I’m

I mean, my grandfather was a plasterer, and the thing about him that I’m left with was his love of what he did. He did that eight hours a day and came home, and you felt that he wanted to get back there and do it again. His daughter, Julie, lives with her mother, a New York actress.During the late 1980s, Pacino also started to make his own films. After the requisite years of painstaking development, he finally made his directorial debut in 1996 with Looking For Richard. A semi-documentary that combined conversations with noted Shakespearean actors and scenes from Richard III, it was part-workshop and part-catharsis for Pacino, who had received the worst reviews of his career when he played Richard on Broadway in 1979. I see so many plays I wish I’d done, because I think it would have been important to me for learning and growth.”A series of high-profile flops in the early 1980s – Cruising, Author! Author! and Revolution – were a painful reminder of that desire, and he took a four-year break from the movies He also became a father for the first time.

“Somebody once asked me, `How come you never played Hamlet?’ I don’t think I’m particularly right for the part, but I was never asked.”Pacino turns down many more films than he accepts, but promises that there’s no danger of him retiring soon. Although he’s now working on another project, Chinese Coffee, he won’t be directing it. “The level of directing that’s out there is so consummate that I do it the way I paint, or sing in the shower,” he says with a shrug. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he dated a string of actresses – Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Marthe Keller and Diane Keaton among others – but he’s never married, and seems content with his solitary existence in upstate New York. But he’s not prepared openly to condemn 1990s Hollywood and its special effects-dominated movies “It’s not a question of them being less good I think it’s a question of them being different. It’s one of the great performances in modern cinema.Although he’s as complex a villain as it’s possible to imagine, even Corleone pales in comparison to Lucifer.

When you think of Dog Day Afternoon, that was the first time that you were seeing the media dealing with a real-life situation, where this guy’s robbing a bank and it’s being televised. Somehow journalism, television, the media have taken up a lot of the issues and expressed them, while film is becoming more esoteric and fantastical. It was kind of like looking at an old photograph of yourself You wonder. You just wonder and say, `I can’t quite relate’,” he chuckles.Pacino was fortunate that he emerged as a young actor at the same time as American cinema was going through one of its great periods, with directors like Coppola, Scorsese and Altman consistently making innovative and risky films. He wears his evil on his sleeve, he has more relish, whereas Michael was reluctant and had to rationalise what he did.” Pacino doesn’t seem comfortable when looking back on past work – take his reaction to seeing The Godfather in a cinema for the first time: “I hadn’t ever seen it on a big screen, because when it opened I was too nervous, and that was interesting.

“With the devil it’s different because he’s out there, he doesn’t have to hide. They’re herbal and they smell a bit like grass,” he says wistfully as he extracts the packet from his pocket. “People think you’re really cool after you have one of these, but I’m really not.”At 19, Pacino was hanging out at theatre workshops and leading the life of a Greenwich Village slacker. “In the time I grew up you kind of avoided ambition, it had a pejorative connotation for some reason,” he recalls Neither was it a great time to be ethnic. “We seriously thought of changing our names, because if there was a vowel at the end of it and you wanted to be an actor it was difficult.” In 1966, though, after initially being rejected, he got into the Actor’s Studio and met Strasberg.